Liberty Falling-pigeon 7 (32 page)

"Search for what?" Joshua asked politely.

"You'll know it when you see it." Anna realized she was being exasperatingly like Hercule Poirot in her refusal to divulge information and she wasn't quite sure why. New York City, Columbia-Presbyterian, the islands, Molly, Frederick, Dr. Madison--something in the chemistry of all or any of these things had worked in such a way that she did not completely trust her own truths, her own observations. She was reminded of college when she and her friend Ted were doing a lot of drugs and reality was a nebulous commodity. At parties they would sidle up to each other periodically and inquire, "Confidentially, am I blowing it?"

She entered the door to her left: an old operating theater with low central light and white tile on walls and floor. When this room was in use surgery had been a bloody business. Architects designed the space with an eye to cleanup. To one side were two small, windowless utility rooms fitted with unusual sinks. Nothing of interest. The next door down the hall led to a suite of rooms, possibly a doctor's living quarters. Anna opened every cupboard. Nothing. Three more rooms. Nothing. Frenzy was taking over. She forced herself to stop and breathe. Searches could not be rushed. And if she was right, the plan would have been to fool at least the casual observer. Joshua came to the door of the room where she stood. His black spiky hair was frosted with plaster dust. Cobwebs traced fine lines from epaulette to badge. He was looking enormously pleased with himself.

"You found it," she declared.

"Found it."

She followed him back one door to the right side of the hall facing the Registry Hall--there was no accounting for taste. Fallen plaster and mildew had grown up around the partly opened door, cementing it in place.

Clever. Casual--or fat--observers would be discouraged.

"After you," Joshua said.

Anna slipped through easily but the policeman, thick of shoulder and chest, gathered a few more cobwebs as he squeezed in a second time.

Like the others, the room appeared empty and decaying.

"It took me a minute," Joshua said generously, then ruined it by adding: "And I'm a trained observer."

A shift in perspective and Anna saw it. The floor in the corner away from the windows was not a floor. A tarp, painted in the theatrical tradition of trompe l'oeil, had been spattered and speckled to match the mildew, moss and rubble of the real floor. "It's well done," she said.

"Actors and guerrillas," Josh said. "Masters of disguise."

Anna crossed the room and peeled back the canvas.

"A squatter," Joshua said unnecessarily.

"It had to be," Anna said. Underneath the canvas were the components of a comfortable camp: stove, sleeping pallet and bag, gas lantern, candles. Anna remembered the wax she'd found under the stairs on Island III, but those had been shavings, not drips. Corinne also had had a metal chest for food storage, even a battery-powered CD player. One of the actors had remarked that Billy's paranormal phenomena were anachronistic. The Park Policeman had sworn he'd heard steel drums late at night. The Chieftains' jewel case was in Corinne's collection.

"Corinne was living here," Anna said, and told him of the gossip, how the actress came earlier and left later than the rest of the troupe. Corinne wasn't coming and going at all, she was staying and lying.

"Hiding out from the bad-ass boyfriend?" Joshua suggested.

"That or the high rents in Manhattan." Anna put the tarp back as she'd found it. This was the Park Police's problem now.

"That explains why she was on the island," Joshua said, "but why was she in the infectious disease wards in her nightie with a candle?"

"Waiting to scare the pants off Billy Bonham is my guess," Anna replied. "Not much else to do nights for a creative type. Torturing Billy probably passed the time."

"Oh gosh." Joshua came to a sudden realization. "The groaning he heard. Oh, Jesus. That was real, her in that garden. If she dies, Bonham as good as killed her."

"He gets second billing," Anna said. "Whoever bashed her over the head killed her." Then an ugly thought surfaced. It turned into pictures and they flickered behind her eyes like a silent film. Billy, making his rounds. Scared, strung tight from nights of seeing ghosts, hearing things. Corinne, waiting, trying not to laugh, planning her next performance. Billy passes in a dark hall. She steps out with the candle, wails in proper banshee fashion, and the boy, too scared to think, strikes her down with his baton. Bending over her, he realizes what he's done, can't face the music, tosses the girl in the garden and switches to day shifts.

"Not good," she echoed Joshua. "Not good at all."

20

Anna slept most of the day. Because going to bed after sunrise was too much like being sick, she sacked out on the couch in Patsy's living room.

At length, voices intruded pleasantly into her dreams and she let herself wake into the comfortable security that can come from knowing one is not alone.

"Bad juju," Patsy was saying. "Corinne, Hatch. I feel like some new age woo-woo sneaking into a kiva to meet the spirits saying this, but I swear I sensed something the night Hatch died. You must have too. In the wee hours when I got up, you were rattling around."

"Everybody says that shit after the fact," came a voice not nearly so welcome: Mandy. She shut Patsy down: "I didn't hear you 'sensing' anything at the time."

"Who knows," Patsy said, always the peacemaker. "Something's out of whack, though. Maybe it's just tourist season. Or maybe the monument slipped into a karmic warp. Sins of the past and all that."

"Sins is right," Mandy said. Anna chose to feign sleep a
tad longer. Before she faced Patsy's roommate she needed to let her blood pressure creep back up to a consciousness-sustaining level. "'Open the golden door.' Fuck. A swarm. Come here and get on welfare."

That did it. Anna's diastolic shot up.

"Hey, look who's awake," Patsy said cheerfully. "Even the dead will rise someday."

Honeyed afternoon light flooded through the windows. Neither Patsy nor Mandy was in uniform. "What time is it?" Anna asked, feeling like Rip Van Winkle.

"Five-fifteen. We've been home half an hour. You were out like a light," Patsy told her.

Elbows on knees, head between slumped shoulders, Anna let her body grasp this new semivertical reality.

"We heard about your adventures," Patsy said.

Anna grunted. Of course they had. News travels faster than the speed of light in bureaucracies. If information were disseminated at a tenth the speed of gossip, government agencies would be models of efficiency. "Any word on Corinne? She dead yet?"

"Miss Sensitivity," Mandy sniped.

The phrase "horse's patootie" slid into Anna's mind from some bygone conversation.

"Not dead," Patsy said. "And maybe not going to be. Josh called the Chief Ranger and he and the Superintendent got to the hospital about ten minutes after Corinne."

"Photo op," Mandy said.

Anna didn't argue. In general, the NPS was a more or less caring organization, but most of the brass did dearly love to see their names in the paper. Unless they were up to something the public would frown on--like killing burros or closing campgrounds.

Patsy laughed. "No press. A girl gets mugged. This is big news in New York? Anyway, they talked to the doctors and Corinne's in had shape, but she's alive. You saved the day, girl. Another few hours and she'd've died of thirst. And they say kids got no heroes anymore."

"If you ladies will excuse me," Mandy said politely, and rose from her chair, "I'm going to go puke."

When Mandy had shut herself behind her bedroom door, Patsy asked, "What did you do to get so far on her bad side?"

"Beats me. Looked at her funny, I guess."

"The kids had a puppy like you once. That puppy'd sit and look at our old dog in this one certain way and all of a sudden Tilly would go nuts and chase him all around the house clacking her teeth like an old lady with loose dentures. Test telepathy,' the kids called it."

"Great. I get one sixth sense and it aggravates people." Anna's head was clearing. She began cracking finger joints to bring her body up to speed.

"Ugh," Patsy said. "One day you'll fall down in a heap of bones and it will serve you right. Don't feel too bad about Mandy. She's going through something. She used to be okay--not the kind that fits in, but the kind that wants to. Tries too hard. A couple months ago she changed. She got kind of aggressive. A worm turned or something. Like she decided to hate everybody who didn't like her instead of sucking up like she used to. My guess is some boy dumped her."

"Good for him," Anna said uncharitably. "Did they say what the extent of Corinne's injuries were?"

"Let me see..." Patsy laid her head back and closed her eyes. Anna appreciated it. Not everyone made the effort to remember things accurately. "Severe concussion. Hairline fracture of C-three--" She opened one eye and looked questioningly at Anna.

"Third cervical vertebra," Anna said.

"That's what I thought. From being hit on the head?"

"Unless she fell. But probably from a blow. If she'd fallen from high enough to do that much damage, chances are her neck would have been broken--more than just a hairline fracture."

"Okay." Patsy closed her eye again. "Dehydration. Insect bites. Cuts and contusions on hands and arms."

"Brain damage?" Anna asked, remembering the raccoon eyes.

"Probably."

"Did she regain consciousness at all?"

"She sort of mumbled to the Superintendent, but I gather it wasn't consciousness per se. If her condition has changed since, I haven't heard. Bless the Super's politically savvy little heart, she was all warm and smiley. Not a peep about Corinne squatting on Island Two. I tell you, that woman is on the fast track.

"And since you're bound to ask: No. I don't know if Corinne's mumbles were about who bashed her over the head."

"I'll find out."

"Of course you will. God forbid you should just kick back, mind your own business, take in a Broadway show."

"God forbid."

The Superintendent could not be reached. The Chief Ranger was being cagey. If he was in the loop at all, Trey Claypool might be more forthcoming. Anna chose to beard him in his den. She crossed the twelve feet of grass between Patsy's house and his, and banged on his front door.

Without inviting her in, he told her what he knew. No one had any idea who the attacker was. Corinne was in a coma.

Disappointed but not surprised, Anna thanked him and went "home." If Corinne did recover consciousness and still had the use of her brain, she might not be able to tell them what had happened anyway. The kind of amnesia old novels relied on so heavily, where people forgot their lives for years on end, was practically nonexistent, but blunt trauma to the head frequently caused temporary and/or partial amnesia. Corinne may not have even seen her assailant. The head wound was from behind. Either she never saw who did it or had turned and was fleeing when she was struck.

Showering, making herself presentable for Molly, the city and, she had to admit, David Madison, if he happened to be on duty, Anna contemplated the location of the actress's wound and was cheered. The scenario she'd envisioned where a freaked-out Billy Bonham hushed at a ghost and hit a girl didn't fit with a blow to the back of the skull. The side maybe, the temple or the face.

Anna had a sense that Corinne was smart, a good actress and mischievous almost to the point of mean. In keeping with the demands of the role she'd created, she would have placed herself somewhere she could vanish in true ghostly fashion. Never let the audience backstage. She would have stayed far enough from Bonham that he couldn't grab her or get a clear look at her in the light of his six-cell flashlight. Anna moved Bonham down on her list of suspects. Since the list was short to nonexistent, the pretty Park Policeman didn't gain much.

In no mood to be dashing desperately through the bowels of Manhattan, a slave to the NPS staff boat schedule, Anna stowed a change of clothes in her backpack. A night away would be therapeutic. She had a touch of island fever, brought on mostly by Patsy's roommate. A piece of real estate a man with a good arm could throw a rock across wasn't big enough for the both of them. At Molly's, Anna would have a degree of privacy, more hot water, and unhampered use of the phone. The emerald ring and the statement of his honorable intentions made it okay for her to bunk with the FBI guy. And Frederick wouldn't mock her bloodhound tendencies. He suffered from the same disease, the kind of illness that makes people take apart perfectly good clocks just to see what makes them tick.

Squashing a change of underwear between a paperback book and a banana, she thought of her two-year relationship with Frederick Stanton. Her ego suffered a pang because with her, love hadn't bloomed, a ring and death-do-US-part hadn't been offered. For an instant she was tempted to dwell in that pain, get all the drama out of being the woman scorned, but she couldn't make a go of it. She wasn't loved because she didn't want to be loved. She wasn't asked because she didn't want to be asked. Around her, buried neatly under the emotional sod, was the human equivalent of an electric fence. If a man got too close, he got a jolt in the neck. Once or twice was sufficient to train most.